A Reality Check on Author Access to Open Access Publishing
Hilda Bastian, PLOS Blogs, Absolutely Maybe, 2018/04/26
I recently wrote an article about critical thinking for educators and I'm thinking that a follow-up on scientific reasoning might be a good idea. The machinations in this email exchange on open access journals is a great case in point. Heather Morrison reports that "73% of fully OA journals (about three quarters) do not charge APCs." In a PLOS blog post Hilda Badtian responds that the 73% represents a disproportionate number of journals that do not publish in English, are not indexed in PubMed, or do not issue DOI for the articles. More...

Opportunity or Exploitation?
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/04/26
This the sort of innovation that would be classified as "disruptive" were is accompanied with an app and some Silicon Valley VC funding (which may yet happen; don't rule it out). More...

Community Standards
2018/04/26
This document is being depicted as Facebook's "content moderation standard" but it isn't that. It's a document aimed at users and describes what Facebook is calling its "community standards" but is more like a plain-language version of its terms of service. This is an important distinction because the concept of "community standards" is originally (and still!) a representation of what the community thinks is appropriate, not a service provider. More...

How Open Education Can Change the World (Reprise)
Stephen Downes, Apr 26, 2018, Educacion y Technologia en y Para La Diversidad, Medellin, Colombia
I define and explore the application of open education and open educational resources (OER) to peace, reconciliation and development in Colombia. I describe how new technologies have made possible new ways of learning, and how we can work together as a community to teach ourselves, thus allowing each person the voice and opportunity to play a meaningful role in society. This is a more polished version of the talk given in Rionegro. More...

The State of Innovation in Higher Education: A Survey of Academic Administrators
Andrew J. Magda, Jill Buban, Online Learning Consortium, The Learning House, Inc., 2018/04/25
I'm not sure administrators are the best people to ask about innovation at educational institutions, and they'll say typical things like "Administrators often discuss a top-down approach — the president and provost setting the tone and directive for innovation at the institution — as creating the most success in innovation" (I find that consultants say this sort of thing as well, maybe because they are marketing their services to administrators). More...

Having an audience makes us better at performing
Jill Rosen-Johns Hopkins, Futurity, 2018/04/24

I think we've generally believe that the headline is true, but it's always nice to be able to back our intuitions with research. The open-access paper being discussed is called Neural substrates of social facilitation effects on incentive-based performance. More...

In “EdTech”, “Ed” comes before “Tech”: A National Louis University/Acrobatiq Case Study
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2018/04/24
I'm sure that the series this article introduces will be valuable, but my purpose here is to be a bit pedantic, but in so doing, allow me to illustrate the difference between my perspective and Michael Feldsteins. The pedantic point is that you can draw inferences about what ought to be done on the basis of quirks of language. Yes, 'Ed' comes before 'Tech'. But there isn't some 'Tech Ed' which is about the use of technology first in education. Rather, 'Tech Ed' means something completely different. So it means nothing that 'Ed' comes before 'Tech'. More...

The new geo-politics of higher education
Simon Marginson, Centre for Global Higher Education, 2018/04/24
This paper argues the case for the global network of world class universities (WCUs). "The outcomes of higher education are not confined to, or even primarily, the creation of private economic and status benefits for graduates. Institutions of higher education generate many other individual and collective benefits, on both the local/national and the global planes." Fair enough. More...

How Open Education Can Change the World
Stephen Downes, Apr 24, 2018, Universidad Catolica de Oriente, Rionegro, Colombia

In this presentation I explore the application of open education and open educational resources (OER) to peace, reconciliation and development in Colombia. More...

Open Chasms – definitions dividing or uniting the open community? Some thoughts from #oer18
Sheila MacNeill, howsheilaseesIT, 2018/04/23
This is a bit of a natural follow-up to Phl Barker's post of the other day. Sheilla MacNeill addresses what she calls David Wiley's "potted history of open, open source, learning objects" and argues "if we don’t explicitly address diversity,  actively seek to include, support and embrace different voices, it’s not the difference between purists and pragmatists that will divide a community –  it’s who is included and excluded." That's all very good, but the people who get to make that point are the people who are actually doing it, or better, the people who have been excluded. More...